Australian news, and some related international items

The Story of Sustainability in 2018: “We Have About 12 Years Left”

Harvard Business Review 27th Dec 2018 Andrew Winston, – We have about 12 years left. That’s the clear message from a monumental
study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

To avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, and completely decarbonize by 2050 (while, in the meantime, emissions are still rising).

The IPCC looked at the difference between the world “only” warming two degrees Celsius (3.8°F) — the agreed upon goal at global climate summits in Copenhagen and Paris — or holding warming to just 1.5 degrees. Even the latter, they say, will require a monumental effort “unprecedented in terms of scale.”

We face serious problems either way, but every half degree matters a great deal in human, planetary, and economic losses.

It wasn’t just the IPCC that told a stark story. Thirteen U.S. government agencies issued the U.S. National Climate Assessment, which concluded that climate change could knock at least 10% off of GDP. Other studies tell us that sea
level rise is going to be worse than we thought, Antarctica is melting three times faster than a decade ago, and Greenland is losing ice quickly as well. If both those ice sheets go, sea level rise could reach 200-plus feet, resulting in utter devastation, including the loss of the entire Atlantic seaboard (Boston, New York, D.C., etc.), all of Florida, London,
Stockholm, Denmark, Paraguay, and land now inhabited by more than 1 billion Asians). https://hbr.org/2018/12/the-story-of-sustainability-in-2018-we-have-about-12-years-left